Amazon thinks it knows what you’ll buy before you do

Late last year Amazon created headlines the world over by announcing plans to deliver by drone. Now, this looks like child’s play compared to its new ambition: sending you your packages before you even buy them.

The retailer giant calls this “anticipatory shipping” and in a patent granted last December outlined how the method could further slim down its already impressively-small gap between receiving an order and delivering it to a customer’s house.

By analysing a wealth of user data including wish-lists, shopping cart contents, previous orders and even how long a mouse cursor pauses over an item, Amazon is confident it could figure out what you’re going to buy before you do.

Items that had been successfully identified would then begin to star down Amazon’s shipping process and may even be “speculatively shipped to a physical address”. The patent also details how partial addresses might be used to get an item closer to a customer, with the exact location provided later in transit.